


What angels are made of

by CeNedraRiva



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Dimensions, Angel Physics, Angel Powers, Angel True Forms, Angels, Eldritch, Fake Science, Fluff without Plot, Gen, Physics, Science, time as a dimension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 09:51:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16385723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeNedraRiva/pseuds/CeNedraRiva
Summary: During a break between research, Dean asks Cas about his true form. It is surprisingly difficult to describe, but Cas does his best to explain.





	What angels are made of

**Author's Note:**

> beta-ed by [prolixdreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prolixdreams/pseuds/prolixdreams)

Castiel frowned, tilting his head in the familiar squint he used whenever he had to try and imagine human thought processes. Dean waited, watching the angel. Some might say Dean appeared patient, but after spending the previous four hours trawling the internet and local books for any clue as to the identity of the ghost haunting the refectory and turning up absolutely nada, he was desperate for a distraction.

“It is difficult to describe in human terms, Dean. I am not sure I can explain it so that you understand.”

“Try? It’s not like I can see for myself, is it?”

“Not if you want to keep your eyes, no.” Cas frowned some more, but now it was his your-antics-amuse-me-human-but-do-not-present-a-solution-to-this-dilemma frown. Dean rolled his eyes.

Finally, Cas nodded, turning to stare more directly at Dean.

“My true form is immaterial and celestial, as you know. To accurately describe it would take a series of highly complex mathematical equations, and an understanding of how the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions interact with the first three. But I think I can summarise it, to a degree.”

“Okay, wait, which dimensions?”

“I believe your physicists refer to them as length, width, depth, time -”

“Time’s a dimension?”

“Yes.”

Well, okay then. Dean wasn’t going to argue physics with an angel.

“Is that how you travel in time?”

“It’s part of the method, yes.” Cas paused for a second, considering. “Humans can naturally sense the first four dimensions, although you can only manipulate three. Angels can sense the first six, and manipulate five. When we are in our true forms, we can move freely through time, although we cannot change the past. The future, however, is rather malleable. You experienced this when Zachariah demonstrated the world fallen to the Croatoan virus.”

“The fifth dimension is the future. Got it. So, what’s the sixth dimension?”

Cas merely gave a little huff that, coming from another human, like Sam, would likely have been a dramatic sigh of exasperation. Dean smirked winningly at him.

“The fifth dimension isn’t the future anymore than the third dimension is the direction upwards. It’s like—” Cas cut himself off, reaching to take Dean’s notepad and pen. He turned to a new page and quickly covered the thing with scribblings that only looked vaguely similar to what Dean knew of enochian script, as well as several things that looked like mandalas. After a moment, Cas gave a nod. “As a human, you experience time as a constant forward propulsion, intrinsically linked to space. Every second of your existence, you will be at a different absolute position in spacetime, even if your perception tells you that you have not moved relative to your surroundings. 

“As an angel, I am innately aware of my position in the fabric of spacetime at any moment. It is an essential sense when it comes to time travel. If I were to remain in the same absolute position in space while attempting to travel through time – even if only by a few seconds – I would end up floating in space and no-where near Earth.”

“Because the Earth is moving through space too,” Dean interjected. “Saw that in a documentary once.”

“Yes. Most humans are unaware – physically speaking – of the fact that the Earth is moving. Spinning on an axis at several hundred kilometres per second and hurtling through space in orbit around the sun, but even beyond that, this entire solar system is moving through space too. The Sun itself is tearing across space, only one of millions of other stars that makes up this galaxy, and all of this solar system trails after it.” Cas paused, flicking through the pages he’d scribbled on before passing one to Dean. It was one of the simpler looking ones, made up of a small circle drawn with a comet’s tail and nine smaller comets winding around it.

“I think I get it,” Dean said. “Sort of. Time’s just another set of co-ordinates. Simple enough.”

“Yes, which we are able to ignore if necessary,” Cas added.

“You’ve lost me again.”

“Whenever an angel takes flight, we are able to move through space without travelling through time.”

Dean blinked.

“Whenever you fly off, that’s you ignoring  _ time _ ?”

“Essentially, yes. During the gap between one second and the next, I am able to translocate myself to any other position on Earth, and even move through solid matter – it’s to do with quantum physics, the matter is both there and non-existent without time, don’t worry about it – so to your perception, our flight is instantaneous, but another angel would be able to track my movements in the space between seconds and attempt an interception. Fortunately, I am a very fast flyer,” Cas said with just a hint of pride, and Dean grinned. “Due to the way we perceive time, angels are also able to sense the echoes of events that will have a major impact on their lives – a form of precognition. It can cause a rather fatalistic mentality.”

“Hence all the ‘meant to be’ this, ‘destiny’ that. I remember.”

Cas sighed, leaning back in his seat, his eyes drifting across the walls. The gentle amusement was gone, replaced by the same heaviness Dean saw all too often on Cas’s shoulders.

“I wonder, sometimes, how many atrocities could have been prevented if my brethren and I had been created without our precognitive awareness. So many of our actions were justified by the feeling that things would  _ always _ have happened this way, that some moments in time are unavoidable. 

“We knew the apocalypse was approaching when we all began to sense our deaths draw near – or at the very least, the strong possibility of them. There was also the feeling of absolute victory echoing back to us. Two very definite futures, and with our every action, fewer alternatives left, until all we could feel was death or paradise.”

Dean shivered. The thing was, he could sort of see it. He could remember the weight of knowing your doom, knowing that whatever option you choose, it would all lead to one bloody end. But to have two options, one where everything was perfect and the other with the death of everyone you knew and loved? To physically feel the truth of them both in every moment? And then to have someone who seemed to know better, to understand how to help you avoid that grisly fate? Following orders had never been Dean’s thing, but he could see the appeal of that sort of security, of that faith that it would all end up okay.

Hell, that tendency to follow whoever seemed like they knew what they were doing was the main reason he and Sam were able to save so many poor saps. If any of them had a moment to get their bearings and think straight, they’d start questioning why they were trusting two strangers to save their lives. Was that what it was like in Heaven? Hundreds (thousands?) of terrified angels sensing their deaths coming up, then Michael and Raphael step in, offering to lead them to the light?

Dean remembered a conversation on a bench, years ago now, Cas quietly admitting he wasn’t merely a tool for Heaven’s will, that he had hoped for Dean’s victory.

“Did you – was I a ‘major event’ to you?” Dean asked.

Cas turned to him abruptly, seemingly startled out of some deep thought, before he began to grin. Dean felt his own lips turn up reflexively.

“Of course you were,” Cas murmured. “From the moment I was selected to lead Heaven’s raiding party into Hell, I could feel it. Of course, at the time I had no idea what exactly was going to happen, only that it would be life-changing. Your choices – to rebel, to find another way – they reverberated across Heaven. It was the first time any of us had seen a third possible future. Can you imagine the chaos? A great deal of the pressure Zachariah exerted trying to get you to say yes was directly intended to curb any thoughts of uprisings within Heaven.”

“You’re kidding,” Dean snorted, shaking his head. His cheeks felt pink.

“I’m not.”

“How did we even get onto this topic? All I asked was what your true form looks like.”

“You grew distracted while we were researching and wanted to focus on something else.”

“I wasn’t distracted.”

“It’s been nearly half an hour since you last attempted to read anything at all from the books before you.”

“Did you work that out with your ‘time sense’?”

“Twenty-eight minutes and seventeen seconds exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Twenty-four seconds, now.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Dean said, rolling his eyes. “Go back to talking Star Trek.”

“I have watched an episode of that show, and it didn’t appear to have anything to do with interdimensional physics. They were wandering a picturesque landscape and a large rabbit with a stopwatch appeared.”

“You actually watched Star Trek?”

“It was showing on the motel tv while you were gone. It was... somewhat entertaining.”

“When we go home, we can watch the whole thing.”

“That sounds nice,” Cas said. “Now, the fifth dimension… imagine a mountain, with the creation of the universe as the peak, and the end of all things as its base. In this analogy, time acts as gravity, drawing us all from the peak to the base of the mountain. History is the path this reality took downhill, From where we stand, midway down the slope, there are hundreds of possible paths downhill. The fifth dimension is all possible outcomes from the world as it is so far. All of our possible futures. The Croatoan world would no longer fall within the fifth dimension, because we have moved past the point where circumstances could have led to that future. It now falls into the sixth dimension, as does every other alternative narrative that could have arisen from the same start conditions.”

“Wait, like a world where mom never died? Or like that one where supernatural was a tv show and magic didn’t exist?”

“Yes, they are alternatives. Essentially any world where events played out in a different way to our past. Some are much closer to what you would call reality than others.”

“And you can travel between them?”

Cas hesitated. “Not exactly. I can sense some of them, in the same way I can sense my possible futures. Echoes and impressions, particularly of those worlds where events were very similar to our own, growing more distorted the further it diverges. Mostly I tune it out. Actual travel requires access to the seventh dimension, which is beyond my natural abilities. It is as difficult for angels to travel between worlds as it is for humans to travel through time.”

“We’ve done that once or twice.”

“Yes, but not without outside influence -- magic, grace, that sort of thing.. Anyway, to answer your original question, visually angels appear very similar to stars. But that is simply because you can only see within three dimensions. I have wings, but they are unlike any animal on Earth.”

“They looked feathered to me.” Dean pointed out.

“You have only seen their shadows.” A line appeared between Cas’ brows, showing his focus as he continued.. “It would be more accurate to say bird feathers were loosely based on angel ‘feathers’. Parts of me only exist within one particular dimension and not within others. I am not humanoid in form, particularly. Every part is in a constant state of flux, shifting between versions from my past and future and the closest alternative universes to this one. All of those images overlap.  Like creamer mixing in black coffee, swirling clouds folding inwards.”

“Not sure you’ve made this any simpler, man.”

“Which is more or less as I expected,” Cas said absentmindedly, leaning his chin in one hand. “Wings. Grace. Something like fire glowing from within. I do have a body, hands, eyes, teeth. Something… something insectoid, perhaps? One of my heads has a definite resemblance to a dragonfly’s. And I have at least one pair of eyes that look like faceted garnets. They refract light in the same way. And then there’s the claws. None of which physically exist, at least the way you’d understand. It’s entirely electromagnetic radiation, a very small part of which is visible to human eyes.”

“Right.”

Cas grabbed the pen again, and began to sketch something. Very quickly it grew complicated, and not in the neat way Cas’s mandala sketches had. These ones looked like they were made of wires and hairballs. Cas grabbed another sheet, and scribbled on that too, then another after that. A few minutes later, he collected them all and layered them, holding them up as he used a torch to shine through the layers. Dean could pick out only a few details here and there, mostly on the top layers.

“See this bit? These lines? They’re the part of me that exists on the infrared wavelength. And this part here exists mostly as x-rays. And this spiral here? That is the part of my anatomy that gives me my sense of time, it only exists in the fourth dimension and above. It operates in a similar way to the cochlea in your ears.”

Honestly, Dean still couldn’t really make much sense of the image.

“Is that a tail? Do you have a tail?”

“Two. Only one of them is prehensile. The other is for balance.”

“Right. That makes sense, I guess?”

“It doesn’t really, but don’t worry. Angels weren’t really designed to make sense from an evolutionary perspective.”

“What about that big fuzzy bit? Is that fur?”

“Ah, no, that’s acicular rutile lit from within by grace. Needle-like crystals. Again, they don’t physically exist, it’s more like _ the idea _ of acicular rutile? Either way, they mostly act as a natural defensive feature.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Cas hummed, placing the papers down. “I apologise, I don’t think I can simplify things any further.”

“No, that’s fine. I sort of get it, and you said it yourself, your true form is all eldritch and indescribable, right? This is more than I knew before. Wings, tails, weird crystalline bits.”

Just then, there was a noise at the door, and Dean tensed for a moment before he recognised Sam’s particular frustrated huffing as he shouldered open the door. 

“No, don’t get up, I’ve got it,” Sam grumbled, both hands full with a mix of books, some groceries and a large paper bag branded with some local fast-food joint. The smell of cheap burgers quickly invaded the room. “ Any breakthroughs with that research?”

“We were just about to make a coffee break,” Dean said, reaching to take the paper bag from Sam. His brother only raised an eyebrow, shifting to keep the bag out of reach. 

“Cas?” Sam’s eyebrows were clearly asking for a witness to Dean’s lies or truth on the matter.

“We had reached a natural stopping point, yes,” Cas answered, completely straight-faced. Sam stared at him suspiciously for a moment, before rolling his eyes. 

“Whatever.”

Dean didn’t bother to hide the look that he and Cas exchanged - he knew that Sam would catch it anyway, and Cas returned it no less openly. 

One way or another, it would be back to work.


End file.
